no one's here to sleep
by Summoner Luna
Summary: These dark places are full of guardians, and Squall would not enter without one of his own. -SquallxRinoa, the GF, and origin stories.- -I am Bahamut. Hear me roar.-


_I am Bahamut,_ Squall thinks, standing in the darkness. _Hear me roar._

He is not Bahamut. He is, however, in a darkness deeper than he can remember, deeper than the folds of time, and he is in water that grips him by the ankles. His feet are long numbed to the cold but the hairs on his legs itch, the water soaking into his boots and socks and weighing the fabric of his pants so the legs rub stiffly against him. He knows Rinoa is beside him by feeling alone. It is far too black to see her, and she moves with all the sound and echo of a shadow.

He remembers learning long ago that the center of the planet was a core of heat and flame, but down here it is cold and musty. The image of fire is clear in his mind but Squall cannot image feeling anything except the damp air around him pressing into his skin.

He steps again, one foot after the other. Just as he starts to think about Time, Rinoa brushes a hand against his, and Squall holds his head a little bit higher while they walk.

The dragon was here, before. When they walked far enough that all light went out, when they were in a place so far beneath the surface they dare not risk the air and exposure it would take to fight, he sent Bahamut screaming through the tunnel before them, a literal flare to mark their safe passage. The walls swallowed his terrible cry, but Squall can still hear it in the water with every step he takes, and it comforts him to know he can do it again, will do it again, if needed. There are many things he cannot protect either of them against, but the things down here will not be among them.

These dark places are full of their own guardians, and Squall would not enter without one of his own.

 _I am Bahamut._

It is, after all, the point of this journey.

Bahamut is not alone inside his head right now, and after years without them Squall is grateful for the company the GF provide. It has been so long, since he has shared his mind with anyone except Rinoa, and they bounce around his brain in a way that is wholly different than anything he has with her. Rinoa is as much his own thoughts as he is, but she is walking, breathing, thinking. Rinoa is in his head and she is in her own; she is the soft white haze that warms him when he is cold and brings him peace when all he sees are things he can't control, but she is a woman who hopes and dreams, and she is her own force of madness, wind and feathers calling to him from the sea. The Guardians have no form unless he gives them one. Their voices are not the sights and sounds of the half of him that lives within another, but the voices of time, of worlds forgotten. They are the children and elders of cultures that have thrived and fallen, condensed into a totem that serves the values of the dead. They scream and cry and laugh, and if he is honored they see him worthy as a host, it is nothing to the weight of the sacrifices they have made, that he understands so much more as he steps closer and closer to joining their ranks.

The voices fall collectively silent when they reach the water's edge, and Squall feels he towers over this land he cannot see. The air beside him moves and he reaches for Rinoa's hand, and she gives it a squeeze, and some of his dizziness subsides.

 _Almost there,_ she says. She leaves a sound behind her words that is a laugh, disguised as a dragon's cry.

He shakes his head, and smiles. _Not nice,_ he thinks to her.

She smiles back and reminds him he's a lion, not a dragon, and he's not even that, not yet; but _almost._

They know when to stop, not by any change in the consuming darkness, but when, instead of a pressing stillness, the air is charged, ready, and he feels the intake of breath of thousands of generations: they are all of them waiting, anxious. This is not him, not even him and Rinoa, as he has tried to see it so far. There is history he has never discounted, but in this place that is anywhere and nowhere, he connects to a thread of consciousness, and it overwhelms him.

It is the succession, and it is _the_ succession. His breath catches, and ninety million souls take pause somewhere in his mind, and he knows now, with no uncertainty, that in each of these lost groups of people there was a witch, and there was someone who died for her, and there were people who fought and killed and lived and loved and swore their lives in either pursuit or protection of a woman with magic in her hands.

Some charged particle of air asks him if he knows what it is he is doing. If he understands the extent of what he asks.

 _No,_ he wants to say. He does not. He has been selfish, _they_ have been selfish. This has been him and Rinoa, staring at the first spark of a forest fire they witnessed as teenagers and not knowing if they should help it or hinder it. This has been the only thing left to him from his mother, and what he thought might bring him to understand the family he never got to know. This is not, was never meant to involve the fate of everyone they'd ever met, wrapped up in a fairy tale, then sucked into an emblem worn around his neck. He reaches for the pendant, worn for so many years he rarely notices it is there, and knows he does _not_ understand the extent of what he asks.

Somewhere above them, millions of people Squall has never met wake and sleep. Which of their voices will follow him, if he even succeeds at all? And would he have come down here, had he known this task, driven by nightmare visions, had so long a reach? Had he seen he was not asking to one day join the ranks of gods and monsters, but to carry the voices of a civilization, so those who came after would never truly forget?

The movement in the air stills, and Rinoa moves her hand to his arm.

 _You knew,_ he thinks.

He hears her ask, _You didn't?_

They do not move. Squall feels a timer set somewhere, and knows this window is going to close. Whatever life is in the air is going to shudder out, and he and Rinoa will trudge back through the water somewhere beneath the earth and they will return, tired, dirty, and hollow. This hope will leave them, whether they lock it here for safekeeping or not.

The question, he now knows, is whether the hope of the world they know is linked to theirs.

In the thread of consciousness he hears Edea. He hears his mother. He hears women and men of times when this cave and the water they crossed to get here were green and stood under the sun, and he hears Rinoa.

And he knows. Between them, Rinoa has always been the champion of hope. And this is what she wants.

… _Okay._

She brings her hands to his neck, and Squall feels ninety million souls of the dead let out a breath they didn't know they were holding, hears their sighs reform into the voice of their Guardian until it is once again Squall, Rinoa, and the GF he carries with him.

Rinoa releases the chain, and slides her hands down Squall's chest from behind and brings Griever to rest in his palm. In the darkness, he swears he can see it flash, a low red pulse, and then it grows too hot to hold and he pulls his hand back, and hears a low _pop!_ and the charge in the air around them vanishes, and Squall once more feels it pressing thick against him.

.

They lay deep in a cave beside the chasm of earth through which they descended. When they entered, this place was almost too dark to see, but after the total absence in the plane of water and magic it seems bright here, and they decide to rest, afraid of what the outer world will bring.

"I didn't realize," Squall says out loud. There is a steady chatter in his head from each of the Guardians, and he has a feeling like something is being planned.

"It's not something you can really put into words," she says. He rests his hand against her thigh; it is warm and soft, and he slides it slowly upwards, and her words come out slower, stuttered. "But now you…know."

"It's what you've always tried to tell me."

They make love, hidden in this dark place, and the lost voices of the Guardians grow quiet until it is just the two of them. It is strange, not to feel the weight of Griever hanging from his neck, not to see the point of it graze the space between her breasts, strange, and yet; Rinoa arches against him, and he feels her now in ways he never has before. There is some dissolution of flesh between them, now that the thread of consciousness that flows through her has touched him, now that there is one more way that they are not so different.

"What will they hear?"

The light of the world is already bright, the mouth of the cave not even fully formed, when Rinoa's voice hits him, so loud in the world outside their minds.

He couldn't begin to imagine, and he tells her so, and she laughs. The sound of it is soft in this underground world.

"They'll hear us," she says. "They'll knows ours was a world of love."

He finds her hand and they thread their fingers together. _Love,_ he thinks, and echoes the people of Bahamut, of Alexander, of all the others he called on tonight he had not heard in years. Sometime in the future, years, centuries from now, someone will walk this path with his voice and Rinoa's laughter in the back of their mind. _It is the greatest force of destruction._

In their last steps in the cave, Squall thinks of hours before, of the taste and feel of Rinoa's body in the darkness, of the twisting echo of their cries.

Then he is blinded, when they step, finally, into the light.

* * *

 _Emerald-Latias, Roarke Q. Stratton, and Twin-Lance should know better than to throw out fic-prompts for what should be crack!fic in places I can see them... I have no idea how to begin writing humor, but I can certainly take a ridiculous idea and turn it into some weird marriage of American Gods and Kingdom Hearts. What's **your** superpower?_

 _Random note: fics like this are when I sometimes regret my habit of using song titles to name my fics, because Mumford and Sons have a song called 'The Cave,' but it's just too *obvious.*_


End file.
